Rem Koolhaas/OMA: The Construction of Merveilles

by Roberto Gargiani

Overview

The creator of buildings that stand out as surrealistic marvels amid the skylines of America, Europe, and Asia, Rem Koolhaas, along with his Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), is justly considered as one of the leaders of contemporary architecture. This book, the first critical monograph on the work of Rem Koolhaas and OMA, does more than just describe projects and buildings: It places Koolhaas’s career in a cultural context that allows the reader to better understand the creative process of modern architecture. The works considered are presented in chronological and thematic order, thus retracing the career of Koolhaas from his student days to his neo-avant-garde experimentation at the end of the 1970s and finishing with his most recent works in Porto, Seoul, and Beijing. The individual projects are analyzed from conception to construction, paying particular attention to the conceptual and technical reasons for choices of materials and configuration. Overall, the book addresses the theoretical formulations of Koolhaas, offering a reflection on the fundamental principles of the contemporary architectural project.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9782889153121
Publisher:	EPFL Press
Publication date:	02/15/2021
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.75(w) x 9.50(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Roberto Gargiani has published several works on Perret, Le Corbusier, Labrouste, Semper, and Brunelleschi. Gargiani taught the history of architecture in Florence, Rouen, and Paris then, beginning in 1999, at the Faculty of Archi- tecture at Roma Tre where he was appointed to the post of professor in 2001. In 1999, he became visiting professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), teaching the history of architecture. In March 2005, he was appointed to the post of professor of the history of architecture and construction at the EPFL’s School of Architecture.

Table of Contents

Experiences with the Paranoid-Critical Method / New Sobriety vs. Post-Modern and Contextualism / The epoch of the merveilles / S, M, L, XL, 1995: principles for a theory of architecture / Generic volume, informal polyhedral solids and functional diagrams